Academic committee opts to keep one-day fall break

Posted: Tuesday, October 31, 2006

A one-day fall break before the Georgia-Florida football game won the support of a University of Georgia educational affairs committee whose responsibilities include recommending UGA's academic calendar.

The Educational Affairs Committee of the University Council - an advisory body of faculty, staff and students - took a straw poll Monday to gauge members' support of a task force's proposal that would cut one day off the two-day October fall break and give students a full week off for Thanksgiving.

For the past eight years, some professors argued that the university should eliminate fall break or move it to a different weekend in order to give academics a higher priority than football and keep students from cutting class on Wednesday before the two-day break.

In April, a faculty proposal to delay the start of fall semester 2007 by two days and eliminate the late October fall break almost became policy, but the University Council instead narrowly voted to keep the break and form a task force to suggest changes for the 2008-09 school year.

The Educational Affairs Committee will take a formal vote at its first meeting in 2007, once UGA Registrar Rebecca Macon develops a full calendar proposal, and then forward its recommendation to the full University Council in early spring.

UGA President Michael Adams must sign or veto the proposal and, because the start and end dates for the semester are beyond standard time frames, the University System Board of Regents must give final approval.

Committee member and international affairs professor Loch Johnson said Monday that he will bring a proposal to the next meeting that once UGA and the University of Florida's five-year contract with Jacksonville is up in 2011, that the game alternate each year between a Florida and a Georgia location.

Also at Monday's meeting, UGA Provost Arnett Mace asked the committee to consider changing the academic honesty policy to send cases of students who cheat a second time to a small panel of faculty.

"We need to maintain a strong academic honesty policy," but it needs to be tweaked because faculty have increasingly been dropping their complaints to protect students from expulsion, Mace said.

Last school year, seven of 18 cases of students who faced expulsion for violating the academic honesty policy a second time were dismissed because faculty members withdrew their complaint, said academic honesty coordinator Deborah Bell.

Once a faculty member finds out that the cheating student will be expelled for the second offense, the professor may pity the student and drop the complaint, Bell said.

A new policy could lift the onus of the student's fate off the faculty member who files the complaint and transfer it to an independent panel, Mace said.